On July 3, 1957, seven mafia bosses and their chief lieutenants met at a Las Vegas restaurant to find a peaceful solution to the resent inter-family violence which threatened to damage the business interests of all concerned. Everyone else was there except one man Morris Forelli from New York, but his right hand man George Sims (who killed one of Forelli’s sons) was present.

Forelli’s men rushed in and killed all twelve competitors and the traitor. Their bodies where secretly buried somewhere in the Nevada desert. Soon the dead men passed into legend and to be known as “The Vegas Thirteen”.

Several years’ later U.S.A government tested a pocket Gamma bomb (new tactical weapon) in the desert near the buried remains. When the Gamma radiation met the remains of the bodies the result was patchwork monster that dug its way to the surface with one thing in its mind New York mobster named Forelli.

When Digger got to New York it started to do damage to Forelli’s business trying to work its way up to the boss himself. When Detective Lamont of the NYPD started to find a mix of fingerprints from five different long-dead mobsters all in the same hand-mark. He realized that he needed help and pulled Spider-Man in to help him to solve the case.

Lamont wasn’t the only man looking for the wall-crawler’s assistance in dealing with Digger. Surveying the trail of devastation, Morris Forelli realized that his normal henchmen couldn’t stop Digger. Forelli contacted Spider-Man and offered him money if the web-slinger would protect him and his daughter from Digger. Spider-Man decided to take the money, because he didn’t see any harm on taking money for protecting human lives that he would have protected for nothing anyway.

After a combination of cellular analysis and experimentation, Spider-Man realizes that Digger was vulnerable to exhaustion after a protracted battle, unable to hold his various component parts together and making him vulnerable to be destroyed. Spider-Man didn’t have any other choice than destroy Digger, but took some comfort from the fact that Digger was not really alive in the first place.